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SEE NO EVIL

Many looked the other way when they learned of Neil Goldschmidt’s crimes

By Fred Leonhardt

For The Register-Guard

Appeared in print: Sunday, Feb. 13, 2011, page G1

Ursula Le Guin’s story, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” is set in the ultimate Shining City on a Hill, a place of joy and happiness, full of educated, creative types who spend their days frolicking at festivals and occasionally indulging in (non-habit-forming) drugs that reveal the secrets of the universe while “exciting the pleasure of sex beyond all belief.”

There are “fast little trains and double-decked trams” in Omelas. And a farmers’ market.

There’s just one catch — the “happiness, the beauty of their city” depends on a single child being locked away in a tiny room, kept in darkness, isolation and misery:

“If the child were brought up into the sunlight, … all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. ... The child’s torture is no secret. The good people of Omelas know.”

Portland is Omelas. Maybe all of Oregon is Omelas. And the child upon whose cruel treatment the people’s happiness depended was a 14-year-old girl, the victim of long-term sexual abuse by Neil Goldschmidt, who served as mayor of Portland and governor of Oregon.

Goldschmidt’s crimes came to light in 2004, decades after the abuse began. The statute of limitations protected him from prosecution.

Goldschmidt has vanished from Oregon’s political scene, at least for now, but public attention focused once more on his offenses when his victim died on Jan. 16 in a Portland hospice of undisclosed causes at age 49. Her short life was full of suffering, in large measure because of Goldschmidt — but also because of the people of Omelas.

Over Spanish coffees at Huber’s Cafe in Portland in late 1994, a friend and colleague from Goldschmidt’s governor’s office told me a story about a girl he had dated occasionally back in the 1970s. She was 14, and he was 16. One night, as he walked up to her front door, he heard music. He stood quietly and watched through the window as the girl danced about the living room. She was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen.

She confided in him that she and then-Mayor Goldschmidt were having sex. He went to his parents, who knew and admired Goldschmidt. The girl was crazy, they said. Ignore her. Neil’s a great man.

In May 2004, on the day Neil’s criminal past was finally revealed, my friend called me. He said it was a shame the story had come out: “Look at all the terrific things he did for Portland and Oregon.”

He would later tell The Oregonian “he was stunned to learn of Goldschmidt’s secret.”

“Obviously,” he said, “this is something that has troubled (Neil) forever.”

“Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it.”

Neil’s friends rallied to his side after he was exposed in May 2004:

“I predict he’ll be back,” former Mayor Vera Katz said.

Multnomah County District Attorney Michael Schrunk told The Oregonian, “Outrage over the affair will fade with time. I think he still has something to offer.”

Neil’s rabbi, Emmanuel Rose, bemoaned the “depth of public humiliation to which he has been subjected. …” He wrote that “Darkness for her also meant darkness for Neil.”

“This is not a story about an adult man having sex with a young girl,” according to Neil’s friend Bob Burtchaell in an Oregonian op-ed piece at the time. “It’s really about a man redeeming himself.”

Another close friend of Goldschmidt’s, Alan Webber, now finds solace in the fact that “no one usually gets killed” in sex scandals, “although there is real damage to be sure.”

“The child, who can remember sunlight and its mother’s voice, sometimes speaks. ‘I will be good,’ it says. ‘Please let me out. I will be good!’ ”

Neil’s victim knew I had tried to expose Neil’s crimes and the subsequent cover-up to The Oregonian in 2003, five months prior to Willamette Week’s exposé. She called me several times in December 2007 and January 2008. She was hurt and wanted to talk to a sympathetic listener. Neil and his sycophants had lied about her in the press and on-line. She was upset at having been called a sexual predator.

She said Neil had taken her to parties where she met Oregon’s power brokers and politicians.

Did they know?

She said, “When you take a 14-year-old to a party, what else could it be?”

She was told she should be proud that such an important person respected her intellect.

She later tried college and acting school, but nothing worked out for her.

She named those on the mayor’s staff who knew and who years later offered her help finding work, preferably far away, like Jumby Bay, Homer Williams’ Caribbean resort.

The relationship with Goldschmidt went on for many years, she said, well into his term as governor. His state police driver would pick her up and deliver her to him. They went to parties at the Veritable Quandary and at the house of then-Portland City Councilor Earl Blumenauer, now a member of the U.S. Congress. She even visited the governor’s office in Salem.

She told me she was getting “lots of therapy.” She talked about her emotional pain, her overwhelming fear of Neil and how hard it was to live in Portland because too many people knew her identity. She felt too fragile to come forward and tell her story. People would hate her.

“Neil Goldschmidt is God,” she said.

“One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt.”

He delivered his final speech as governor in the basement of the Hilton hotel in 1990, where years before he had raped the young girl in a room upstairs.

Throughout his term in office he had talked of the need to reach out to abused, abandoned and drug addicted children. In the speech he said, “No matter how much damage we’ve done to these kids, it’s never too late. If someone can make a connection, they will somehow find their way to the right place.”

Many in the audience had known for years what he had done to the girl; others would find out over time. They stood and cheered, some wept. He had seduced them, too.

For the privilege of being in on “The Deal;” for the money made from corporate takeovers, condo developments and light rail extensions; for the cushy executive position with all the perks; for the high political office; for the entry to the Arlington Club; for the skids greased and the backs scratched; for nothing more than an occasional pat on the head from the Great Man himself; for a young girl’s life — the best and the brightest looked the other way.

There was no conspiracy of silence. People talked. People knew. Instead, there was a conspiracy of indifference — which is far worse.

They still attend parties in his honor. To this day, they are lost without him telling them what to do. “People like Neil don’t come along very often,” former Gov. Ted Kulongoski reminds us.

In the end she was the only one who stood up to him: The confidentiality agreement she and Neil signed in 1994 stipulated that he would never again run for public office. It was her gift to Oregon.

She told me in 2007, “My life was taken away from me.”

And now her life is over at age 49.

At the end of her story, Le Guin writes of the few for whom the suffering of a child in exchange for happiness is intolerable:

“They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. ... But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”